For a select few, mechanical keyboards hold a special place in their hearts, unfortunately for those people the number of mechanical keyboards on the market is very small with even less having any type of unique design for gaming. Razer recently introduced the Razer BlackWidow mechanical gaming keyboard, which uses the Cherry MX Blue switches to give it auditory and tactile feedback along with requiring less pressure to actuate. Razer hope to compete with the SteelSeries 7G and the Qtronix XARMOR-U9BL using the BlackWidow's venomous bite as its weapon. As Razer's first foray into the mechanical keyboard market, and Benchmark Reviews will determine whether the BlackWidow is as venomous as they claimed or if it's all for show.

With the introduction of AMD's Cayman GPU, the Radeon HD 6870 video card becomes their flagship DirectX-11 desktop video card. Gamers can expect the Radeon HD 6970 to quench their thirst for demanding graphics power while introducing several new MSAA modes such as Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA). The AMD Radeon HD 6970 features enhanced DirectX 11 tessellation effects, while still producing top-end frame rates to help gamers build their killstreak. In addition to a new VLIW4 shader core architecture, the Cayman GPU also offers accelerated multimedia playback and transcoding, AMD HD3D stereoscopic technology, and the 3D Blu-ray multi-view CODEC (MVC). In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests graphical frame rate performance of the Radeon HD 6970 using the most demanding PC video game titles and benchmark software available.

Mad Catz, famous for their console peripherals, has been making the spotlight in the PC gaming market with their innovative designs. Mad Catz's recent acquisition of audio manufacturer Tritton shows their intentions to establish a firm foothold in the PC peripheral business. This time they bring us the Mad Catz Call of Duty: Black Ops Dolby Digital 5.1 Gaming Headset. Benchmark Reviews will test how well this headset delivers surround sound, and decide whether it's worth the $149.99 price tag.

The GeForce GTX 480 got an incredible amount of criticism when it first came out. To be honest, I think a lot of people were just letting off steam at NVIDIA for taking so long! The three biggest concerns were: an architecture that wasn't optimized for gaming, power consumption, and its evil twin - heat. A short while after the release date, Benchmark Reviews started seeing new cards that consumed less power and weren't so toasty. Now, at the twilight of the product life for the GTX 480, a few vendors have attempted to put those problems completely to rest. The Gigabyte GV-N480SO-15I GeForce GTX 480 Super Over Clock is one of the best examples of that effort, and it represents what the GTX 480 could have and should have been at its launch. There are a ton of benchmarks out there for the reference GTX 480 already, but let's dig a little deeper and take a complete look, inside and out, at Gigabyte's premium GTX 480 video card.

Human input devices (especially the mouse) are very much akin to musical instruments. They are both designed to take the coordinated movements of human hands and transduce them into a predictable yet marvelous output. For instruments the output are sound waves, but on a computer the output can be any imaginable manipulation of a virtual world. In both cases the benchmarks for quality are surprisingly similar. For example, what is it made of, is it well made, does it feel good, is it convenient to use, does it work well and does it look good? With these questions in mind, Benchmark Reviews reviewed the newest release from Mad Catz, the Call of Duty: Black Ops Stealth Mouse. Based on the Cyborg R.A.T. platform the Stealth Mouse adds some style that, for this reviewer, stirs up some new thoughts about the future of gaming mice.

A "Hackintosh" is a computer that runs Apple's OS X operating system on non-Apple hardware. This has been possible since Apple's switch from IBM's PowerPC processors to Intel processors a few years ago. Until recently, building a PC-based Mac was something done only by hard-core hackers and technophiles, but in the last few months, building a Hackintosh PC has become much easier. Benchmark Reviews looks at what it's possible to do with PC hardware and the Mac Snow Leopard OS today, and the pros and cons of the building a Hackintosh computer system over purchasing a supported Apple Mac Pro.

When you are shopping for a gaming keyboard what features are at the forefront of your mind? If you are looking for LED backlit keys, an LCD display or macro keys then you won't find them here. Benchmark Reviews brings you the SteelSeries 7G mechanical Gaming Keyboard. SteelSeries have taken a much different approach to the gaming market with their first mechanical gaming keyboard, by bringing durability and quality in the form of individual 18k gold plated mechanical switches and an inner metal chassis to bring to you one heavyweight keyboard. I can't say for sure if this keyboard is an IBM Model M killer because I dont own one of those, but if this keyboard lasts anywhere near as long as some of those Model M's have lasted then it will be a very worthy investment indeed...

Most PC cases sold today don't have any provision for directly mounting a 3.5" device in the front panel. Floppy drives are a thing of the distant past, and most accessory units designed for mounting in this location have adopted the 5.25" format. The Patriot Convoy 425XL takes advantage of this larger environment to provide space for four 2.5" format drives. It's ideally suited for an application where a RAID solution is needed in a small space, particularly the higher RAID levels that require 3-4 drives for a combination of speed and redundancy. Commonly called "laptop" drives, the smaller format is also the most common platform for SSDs. There has been an explosion in the last two years of 2.5" SSSDs on the market; silent and fast, with low power requirements, they would seem to be an ideal companion for this new class of drive enclosure. Benchmark Reviews takes a look at the ins and outs of the Convoy 425XL and then puts it through its paces with a full suite of benchmarking tests.